Friday, January 12, 2007

The Military Spy’s Bag of Tricks

The latest report issued by the American military security authorities shows that Asian intelligence agencies are increasingly active and displaying a lot of new tricks.Nearly 67% of the 971 spy operations carried out against American military programs in 2005 were the work of Asians and 19.3% by Europeans and Russians, according to the latest report of the Defense Security Services (DSS), an agency assigned to protecting the American defense industry.

Completed in June, 2006, the report was made public only this month. According to the DSS, among the things which interest foreign intelligence agencies and corporations the most are simulation technology, lasers, and sensors - indispensable components for guidance systems - along with detection and night vision technology. The methods employed to spy on the Americans can be particularly sophisticated. The DSS report revealed that on three occasions executives from American defence groups travelling in Canada realized they were being tracked by RFID chips implanted in Canadian coins they carried in their pockets.

Military security men also caught an employee of an American firm recording a classified briefing on a recorder hidden in a pen without the knowledge of his management. Information is often gleaned in joint ventures between an American firm and a foreign partner. The DSS told how an employee of a Middle East defense firm who was working on a joint contract with a U.S. defense contractor, managed to place one of his firm’s computers on the American group’s classified test network. This was supposedly to control the test of a torpedo counter-measure designed by the foreign company. But the test was also used for a classified American design. When the test was completed the U.S. company asked for the return of the disk and hard drive but the Middle East aide refused. Shortly afterwards his company announced it had developed a second-generation torpedo defense suite similar to the American’s.